VS.NET Macros Stop Working

Jim Shank — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 10:58:56 +0000

Curiosity killed the IDE.
In the last few months I have been experimenting with a host of Visual Studio .NET add-ins. Sometime in there, my Macro environment stopped working. I would run a macro and the task tray icon would flash and then nothing would happen. At some point, I finally coerced an error message of “No such interface supported” out of my Macro IDE but that lead me no where on a Google search. I tried uninstalling all of my current add-ins which was no easy task. Unfortunately, none of the uninstalls remedied the problem. Finally, I decided I would take the big plunge and do a repair on Visual Studio.NET 2003 EA. For those of you who haven’t experience this, it takes about 2-3 hours.

I couldn’t believe it when I went confidently back in and the macro’s still didn’t work. I finally found a reference that looked promising on Matt Renolds .NET 24/7 explaining that poorly behaved add-ins can unregister mscorlib.tlb. The fix posted was to do the following:

REGTLIB.EXE MSCORLIB.TLB

mscrolib.tlb should be located in your
…\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322 directory.
On my XP system, I found regtlib.exe in …\windows\system32\URTTemp.
(though you may have to search your hard drive for this one).

Sincerely,
Ed Dore [MSFT]

I tried that and got a “mscorlib.dll failed : 80029c4a” error. The last part of that thread said to try uninstalling and reinstalling the .NET Framework. I didn’t believe it but after a quick uninstall/reinstall/reboot/patch, my macros are back. I hope someone finds this and doesn’t have to go through all of that again.

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VS.NET Macros Stop Working